When you buy a game on Steam or any other digital marketplace, you acquire a license and not the actual game. This has been the case ever since shops for digital games came up.
The same is true for other digital content. You do not buy a movie, TV show, or music album, you purchase a license to watch or play it.
To make this clearer, Steam is now showing the info right when you are about to make a purchase.
Tip: did you know that you can change the install location of Steam games?
There, you find the following information listed:
A purchase of a digital product grants a license for the product on Steam.
For full terms and conditions, please see the Steam Subscriber Agreement
When you check the subscriber agreement, you may stumble upon the following:
The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services. To make use of the Content and Services, you must have a Steam Account and you may be required to be running the Steam client and maintaining a connection to the Internet.
In plain old English: you purchase a license to access content. Valve or the companies that produce the content may take away that right at any time.
Note that this is industry-wide and not limited to Steam or Valve. When you buy digital games at other stores, for Xbox, Switch, or PlayStation, or for mobile devices, then you will find similar terms.
While it is rather rare that digital content gets removed, it has happened in the past. Companies who operate the stores may decide to drop specific types of content or rights-holders may pull content from a specific store or everywhere.
Microsoft, for instance, removed ebooks from the Microsoft Store in 2019. In 2009, Amazon removed the book 1984 (of all books) from customer devices, because the rights holder decided to pull it from the company store.
Valve removed games as well in the past. In 2013, it removed the game Order of War: Challenge from user accounts because Square Enix closed down the multiplayer servers.
As a gamer, you only have one option to ensure permanent access to your games: buy physical copies.
Note that the option may or may not work well. Physical copies are on their way out in the long run. Also, to play games, you may need updates or link them on Steam, which eliminates the purpose of owning a physical copy.
Some games may also be sold in stores, but they come with a code only. This code is a one-time use only. Nintendo does this a lot and you may want to make sure that the game cartridge is in the box before you purchase the game.
What is your opinion on this? Do you buy digital games or prefer physical copies? Feel free to leave a comment down below.
